#Make your own sirds plus#

It was the deepest convo we'd had in months. He told me how taking on my regular tasks (chauffeuring the kids, cooking) when I was away made him appreciate just how much I do. Rather than bitch about whose turn it was to take out the trash (his, it's always his), I shared how overwhelmed I was feeling. In lieu of the hour-long group sessions at Ornish HQ (they were so intense I cried, in a good way), I sat down with my husband. Discouraged that I couldn't meet the quota, I redoubled my efforts in the 'love and support' realm. Ha! My 3-year-old's internal alarm already chimes well before dawn.) I tried meditating before bed, but kept zonking out after about 20 minutes. (Ornish's staff suggested I wake an hour earlier. I struggled to find a spare 60 minutes just once a day. That Zen evaporated upon coming home to two small kids and a husband with a case of man-flu. By midweek, I was so blissed out that when my hotel's sprinkler system flooded half the building at 6 a.m., I just shrugged it off. In California, we started and ended each day with an hour of meditation and gentle yoga, designed to combat the high blood pressure caused by being chronically frazzled.

#Make your own sirds plus#

I'd already been clocking that much, plus two weekly Pilates classes, so I focused my energy on the Reversal's next principle-stress management. Similar to the American Heart Association (AHA), Ornish prescribes around three hours of moderate cardio (think brisk walking or biking) and two 20-minute strength-training workouts per week. I decided to go balls-to-the-wall and follow the Reversal for maximum impact, using my week in California as a kick-starter, then continuing for a month on my own back home in Pennsylvania. Also, the benefits of the Reversal Program-and its less hard-core cousin, the Spectrum-are appealing: more energy, lower anxiety levels, and healthy weight loss. Plus, new research shows that women like me (and their M.D.s) underestimate their risk for heart attack, and they're more likely to die of one than young men. All four grandparents had high blood pressure three had strokes. My dad has high cholesterol and has been on blood pressure meds for 50 years. And his promise is miraculous, if not controversial: The program can prevent, halt, or even eliminate cardiovascular disease. His followers are true believers (Bill Clinton called on Ornish after his 2010 heart surgery). His tenets-move more, stress less, love more, eat well-sound 'duh' simple. I'd been invited by the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and its founder, the charismatic internist Dean Ornish, M.D., to test-drive his Reversal Program, an intense weeks-long cardiac rehab now offered at 20 U.S. And besides, I hadn't come to California to celebrate. At least I had a nice view-of the mountains over San Francisco Bay. This year (39, gah!), however, I blew out a candle stuck into a wobbly slab of fat-free vegan pudding.

I always celebrate my birthday with a slice of chocolate cheesecake. WH health editor Tracy Middleton laid her heart on the line. One doctor says he can reverse the damage-even keep it from invading your bod in the first place. Maybe these things are actually 'good' for your eyes, because they work out your focusing muscles in unusual ways? Once you play with the concept long enough, you can really control your eyes in weird ways, so I've had conversations with people wherein I uncross my eyes, making them look like a cyclops (and in a less solid way, a triclops), and they don't notice I'm doing it (helps when they're boring me).Nearly 40 percent of women age 20 and older already have some form of heart disease, an often stealth assassin with zero symptoms. Now I'm 30, and still have better vision than all of my friends, and don't require glasses, nor contacts. I even tried out things like having the looping pattern change its repeat length across frames, so I could watch a scene do things like the so-called 'Hitchcock effect,' wherein things appear to spread farther apart, compress closer together, or both simultaneously, depth-wise. It took me most of a night to finally teach him to see them, but he got good like me at instantly snapping into the right mode, and we'd critique our work while in that mode, eyes uncrossed, pointing out things on the screen, discussing new ideas. I even got my friend into it, and we both started coding them up. I did this off and on for a few months, experimenting with ideas. Then when I had enough frames (simple things, like squares and circles bouncing around the screen at different depths) I'd watch them play back for long periods of time, soaking in the novel effect.

It would take awhile to render an image, and a lot of times I'd watch for the few minutes as it rendered, eyes uncrossed, image rendering in 3D for me. I got into stereograms in high school, and wrote my own staticy animated versions in Qbasic, which was all I knew at the time.